Thoughts on Some Current TV Commercials

Maybe it has to do with my background in broadcasting, or maybe it's because I think of myself as a student of pop culture and media, or maybe I'm just a TV geek, but I notice TV commercials.

I find it very illuminating to take note of the commercials that run during particular TV shows and compare them to the content of the show, what channel, etc. To take some obvious examples, you see commercials for reverse mortgages on cable news channels but commercials for tampons on "New Girl." Some take a moment to understand, like laundry detergent during "Meerkat Manor" (target audience: families with young children).

(And for those of you about to comment to the effect of "I don't watch TV!", or "I only watch PBS": please go away. I don't care.)

There's a commercial running currently on MSNBC for a company called "reputation.com" that claims to be able to protect and improve one's online reputation in this era of yelp and Angie's List. The spot posits a couple of fictional business people, a doctor named "Evan McCarthy" and a fashion designer named "Mina Harker". Now, because I am a geek, the name Mina Harker rang a bell; Mina Harker, it turns out, is the name of the fiancée and wife of Jonathan Harker, the two being characters in Bram Stoker's original novel of Dracula, and she appearing (sometimes with different last names) in most Dracula films, as well as in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I thought that was cute, and mildly creative, so I decided to google the other name in the commercial, "Evan McCarthy," see where they got that name from. The first ten or more entries that appeared were references to Jenny McCarthy's autistic son Evan.

Now, one thing you can count on about TV commercials is that nothing is on the screen by accident. Nothing. Advertising is created from the blank page up; anything that appears in an advertisement of any kind is there intentionally. Look at it this way: if you spend $500,000 on a 30-second commercial, that's roughly the same as spending $90,000,000 on an hour-and-a-half movie (which is why, if you want to see the real cutting edge of special effects, watch TV commercials). The reputation.com spot isn't that expensive, to be sure, but it does exhibit sophisticated production values — this isn't Ralph Spoilsport for Ralph Spoilsport Motors (right here in the City of Emphysema), this is a real commercial.

And while using the name of a fictional vampire in a commercial is whimsical, using Evan's name, evoking all the controversy surrounding Jenny and the whole vaccinations-cause-autism hoax — in which people said some really nasty and totally unjustified things about Jenny McCarthy (of whom I am a minor fan) — seems, a, um, poor choice. And don't tell me it was inadvertent (see above).

I like the Cover Girl commercials with Ellen DeGeneres and Sofia Vergara. The use of Ellen as a Cover Girl model was really a brilliant move, not only because lesbians buy makeup too, but because Ellen, while quite pretty, is so unconventionally pretty, and thus easier for those women who don't look like Sofia Vergara to identify with. In addition, Sofia appears to be willing and able to poke fun at herself and her glamorousness — an admirable quality; one commercial has Ellen lampooning Sofia's Colombian accent with a bad Zsa Zsa impression. That, and other spots juxtaposing the two, seem to be telling women, OK, maybe you're not lucky enough to be able to look as good as Sofia, but you can sure look as good as Ellen.

But the one that got to me, that inspired this post, is a commercial for Purina Beneful dog food. (I'd provide a link, but apparently Purina's server is on 14.4 kbaud dial-up.) It grabbed me right where I live. The video is of a dog, who is carrying a tennis ball in his mouth, walking across a field with his human. The narration, from the dog's point of view, is about how good the dog feels, because he knows that when his human threw the ball, and they found it together, they were playing, and it made his human happy, and that makes him feel really good. (Man, just writing about it is giving me shivers.) I'm not doing it justice; the first time I saw it, I caught it from the middle, and when I rewound to watch from the beginning, I couldn't make it all the way through, I almost started crying. Really. This is right up there with the kinds of commercials Kodak used to do (save the memories), or AT&T in their heyday (reach out and touch someone). I forced myself to watch it again a couple of times just to take the edge off it.

Thing is, I can't imagine a commercial like that about a cat. I love my cat, Harvey, and I have no doubt that he loves me. But dogs are pack animals and cats aren't (and were domesticated thousands of years earlier). The kind of devotion you get from a dog is qualitatively different from the kind of affection one gets from one's cat. That you're happy seems more important to one's dog than to one's cat. Or at least they're more demonstrative about it.

I dunno. I've been thinking about adopting a dog for awhile now. Maybe it's time.